As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Share this:

Twitter is infested with trolls, bullies and the general wankeratti. It isn’t a pleasant place to be.

Polly Gillespie has quit Twitter and she explains why:

I was on Twitter for a while before two things dawned on me: Firstly, I was sh*t at Twitter. I wasn’t vaguely funny. I completely miscalculated how things I said would be taken. I had a soft underbelly (literally and figuratively). My hashtags were lame and I was like a gormless gorilla.

I was the nice, chubby kid at school again. Like I really needed to relive that hell. I screwed up several times too with poor attempts at humour, misunderstood references, and by simply just breathing.

Try having an opinion that differs from that of the Social Justice Bullies. You may even get hacked because if it.

The attacks were brutal and relentless. Wow. This was social media lacrosse. I could see how you could break a collarbone or lose an eye or, at the very least, have your confidence rattled.

I wasn’t about to give up though. I was verified. I had the “blue bird” of Twitter “greatness”. I was told this was a big deal. I was “somebody-ish” in Twitter land.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Share this:

Freedom of speech is constantly under attack these days but it is not just political speech that is under attack. Any kind of criticism at all now seems to be unacceptable because it might hurt somebody’s feelings. The below comment seems totally reasonable to me and not at all “misguided” but the thought police writer of the article does not approve.

Yet, inevitably, any “fat-acceptance” or self-esteem media featuring a fat person generates this sort of well-intentioned but utterly misguided comment:

“Being overweight is unhealthy. ‘Fat shaming’ is bad, but so is normalising being unhealthy. Overweight people should be given encouragement and support to lose weight by changing their diet and/or lifestyle. We don’t try and nomalise smoking or dinking [sic] too much. And people who are obese are kidding themselves if they think the extra weight will have no health impacts.”

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

Andrew Little should apologise to tax expert John Shewan for treating him with utter contempt and total disrespect.

Mr Little has been caught out big time — and it serves him right.

Mr Little got things wrong about Mr Shewan and has to put them right.

So Mr Little issued a retraction — at 5:17pm on Saturday, June 20 — two hours and 18 minutes before kick-off of the Wellington Test.

This is so cynical it is sad. Everybody knows that is the absolutely dead time in a media cycle when it would get the least attention. It is cunning and awful and rude and Mr Little’s actions show why people distrust politicians.

Now things have bounced back on Mr Little and his own credibility is being called into question — and it serves him right.

A lot of this is arcane and complex but it is important because Mr Little is auditioning to be Prime Minister. His actions and his words are important.

Mr Little yesterday repeatedly said that Mr Shewan did not ask him for an apology about incorrect statements made about him.

So then Mr Shewan pulled out a letter to Mr Little that said: “I now request the statement I sent to you yesterday be issued with the following additions: ‘I apologise to Mr Shewan for any embarrassment I have caused him through my statements’.”

Sadly for Mr Little, it doesn’t get much clearer than that. Contrary to his public claims, Mr Shewan asked for an apology.

It seems Little lies a little too easily and, more surprisingly, he does so when the potential damage far outweighs the benefits.

It is clear that Andrew Little is easily manipulated into taking a position that he will then blindly defend. Not a “take a backward step” kind of man. That’s a useful trait for a union boss. It is quite a liability for a politician. Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

The board of Kamo High School seem to be changing their story regarding the pulling of support from a local charter school.

They now say there wasn’t any bullying from the PPTA, despite originally claiming that was the case.

Kamo High School’s board chairman says there was no intimidation from the national teachers’ union after the school agreed to let a charter school use its facilities.

The Whangarei school had agreed to give charter school Te Kura Hourua o Whangarei Terenga Paraoa access to its chemistry laboratory but letters released by Act Party leader David Seymour show the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) urged the school to withdraw their support.

Mr Seymour, whose party led the introduction of charter schools in New Zealand, said the PPTA had bullied the Kamo High School out of a “win-win” arrangement. However, the school’s board chairman said the school hadn’t been bullied but he could see both sides of the issue and supported the PPTA.

“I don’t think they are bullies, no one felt intimidated or forced to do anything,” he said.

“On an operational level we have state assets and it’s our view they be available to forward the education of the community.”

Not bullied?

I guess that just proves that Kamo High School are as spineless as a jellyfish.

PPTA president Angela Roberts said she was concerned about the charter school using Kamo High School’s facilities when charter schools receive funding equivalent to $28,000 per student, compared with $15,000 per student for a similar-sized state school.

“We don’t want these schools, which are being propped up by considerable additional funding, using resources at these state schools,” she said.

In a letter sent on May 10, PPTA’s Ms Roberts warned principal Joanne Hutt that sharing facilities could go against health and safety laws and would upset teachers who had voted not to support charter schools.

Two weeks later, the school told Ms Roberts that it had decided not to share its chemistry lab with Te Kura Hourua, saying the issue had become a distraction.

Raewyn Tipene of the He Puna Marama Trust told One News the charter school needed to work in a chemistry area and believed there wouldn’t be a problem to ask the nearby high school.

If that isn’t bullying then it is a clear case of gutlessness from the board of Kamo High School.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

The disgusting bullying tactics of the PPTA have been laid bare as they continue their ideological war on Charter schools.

Act Party leader David Seymour is accusing a teachers’ union of bullying a state school which offered to share resources with a charter school.

Letters released by Mr Seymour show that the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) urged Kamo High School in Northland not to offer support to charter school Te Kura Hourua o Whangarei Terenga Paraoa.

The Decile 5 school had agreed to give the charter school access to its chemistry laboratory.

In a letter sent on May 10, PPTA president Angela Roberts warned the school’s principal Joanne Hutt that sharing facilities could go against health and safety laws and would upset teachers who had voted not to support charter schools.

“At the least this will lead to resentment and ill-feeling, and would be an unfortunate situation where there is no plausible benefit to the students or staff of Kamo High School,” she said. Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Share this:

Three in five women in their late teens have been victims of online bullies, according to new research revealing an alarming number of Kiwi adults encountering the problem.

While new measures have been brought in to tackle the problem in schools, a snapshot of voting-aged New Zealanders found one in 10 people aged 30 to 59 — and a rate twice that for those in their mid- to late 20s — have experienced it.

A new survey asked around 15,000 people if someone had used the internet, a mobile phone or digital camera to hurt or embarrass them.

Rates were highest among young people — 46 per cent of all 18- to 19-year-olds, with the problem worse among females in that age group.”Women aged 18 to 19 reported the highest levels of cyber-bullying among all groups, with roughly three in five experiencing cyber-bullying,” said Harrison Steiner-Fox, who compiled the research using data from the ongoing New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS).

It was in step with previous research that has indicated one in three children are affected by it.

Another recent survey of nearly 750 young people aged 11 to 18, by Otago-based group Sticks’n’Stones, found 87 per cent thought cyber-bullying was an issue — and 255 had experienced it the same year. Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Share this:

In 2009 Twitter was sued by an NFL sports coach who was annoyed at a spoof account mocking him. As a result they changed their operation and their rules.

Since then there have been other cases, some legal and others very public, such as GamerGate, attacks on women in the UK and general bullying. All the issues have resulted in a tightening of the rules.

By April, in another page separate from the Rules, the company also prohibited “threatening or promoting terrorism,” as well as “promot[ing] violence against others… on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, or disability.”

Twitter wasn’t using the term “hate speech,” but the company had effectively banned hate speech.

When asked for comment, a Twitter spokesperson contested this characterization, saying the company does not prohibit hate speech. “‘Hateful conduct’ differs from ‘hate speech’ in that the latter focuses on words. It’s the incitement to violence that we’re prohibiting. Offensive content and controversial viewpoints are still permitted on Twitter.”

Twitter is correct in that their definition of “hateful conduct” does not span quite as broadly as the hate speech prohibited in many European jurisdictions. But given that a viewpoint-based restriction on inciting speech is something that’s alien to American law, and the “hateful conduct” classification looks just like a subset of hate speech, it seems a bit like splitting hairs here.

No doubt there were questions around the language in the rest of the April update. By August, the company had reformulated the phrasing to clarify that it definitely included indirect threats, marking a massive departure from the original rules set out in 2009, which had explicitly limited the prohibition on threats to “direct” and “specific” threats.

Indeed, the new ban on indirect threats contradicted the Rules page, which used the “direct, specific threats” phrasing it had inherited from 2009. But other support pages clarified that Twitter prohibited not only hate speech and indirect threats, but also the “incitement” of harassment—speech that wasn’t a threat per se, but was intended to result in threats regardless.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Please see attached for a letter of service; a copy of the order made by His Honour Justice France at the High Court at Wellington today, requiring you to, among other things, remove all references, comments and/or published copies of the preliminary report [ redacted] (“the Report”) from the websites www.whaleoil.co.nz and www.sribd.com, and/or any other website, webpage or publication used, controlled or managed by the Defendants, together with other orders and restrictions; and a copy of the minute of His Honour Justice France dated 10 September 2015.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.